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On Monday, Judicial Watch released more than 35 pages of emails from Hillary Clinton’s erstwhile top State Dept handmaiden Huma Abedin that reveal the type of Clintonian behavior that no longer shocks, to wit, security breaches and special treatment requests for Clinton friends. You can read all about it here. What is hilarious though, and perhaps more of a concern, is this exchange between Abedin and Clinton minion Monica Hanley:

Abedin: Have you been going over her calls with her? So she knows singh is at 8? [India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh]

Hanley: She was in bed for a nap by the time I heard that she had an 8am call. Will go over with her

The windbaggery started earlier this month when Munger hopped on his exceptionally wobbly high horse and called Ackman’s investment in Valeant Pharmaceuticals (ticker VRX), down about 50% this year and recently under fire for jacking up prices on its drugs way beyond industry standards, “deeply immoral.” Continue reading →

Always a gentleman, Rex Ryan brings his classy act back to MetLife Stadium tonight to face his former team. (Photo: http://www.nydailynews.com)

There’s nothing quite like respect for tradition in the National Football League. Come November faithful fans begin to salivate over the prospect of Thanksgiving Day games with old foes squaring off against each other, mashed potatoes, and a John Madden poultry hybrid called the Turducken. But home cooked meals with cranberry sauce and stuffing and renewed rivalries pale in comparison to Buffalo Bills coach Rex Ryan’s personal “naming the captain” tradition. Not content merely to recognize a job well done from the previous Sunday, Rex likes to name players who played for the team he is facing that day. In anticipation of the game Thursday night in his old stomping ground, MetLife Stadium, Rex has generously named a bit player named IK Enemkpali as one of his captains. His stats this year amount to two tackles in three starts out of eight games, not exactly the stuff of legends. As always, however, Rex has more on his mind than just upholding tradition. Continue reading →

Finally recognizing that the internet is just a fad and will soon go the way of the eight-track tape, Amazon (ticker AMZN) opened a “brick & mortar” bookstore in Seattle last Tuesday. Although the company’s official line implies that the store is designed to peddle Amazon products like Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet by giving customers a place to try them out, Jezebel Pantzaroff, Professor of Marketing at Northern Indiana Normal School and author of the soon-to-be-published Don’t Name Your Product “Crunky Nude Balls,” had this to say about the surprising move by Jeff Bezos’s loss-producing monstrosity (net loss of $241 million in 2014):

The Fire Phone, cloud computing, delivery by drone, you name it- this company is just a dog’s breakfast of half-baked ideas. It’s like they put a bunch of Philip Dick novels in a blender and just guzzled it down. Amazon Fresh? What the hell are they thinking? Food delivery? I mean, Webvan and HomeGrocer were two of the most spectacular failures of the dot-com bust. And the pilot for Amazon Studio’s new show “Patriot” is about a spy who sings folk songs. C’mon, does he live on the Island of Misfit Toys? Is he friends with the cowboy who rides an ostrich? The jig is up. The company’s operating margin was 1.1% in 2012, 1.0% in 2013, and 0.2% in 2014. So it appears they are going back to the basics. I’ve been told that they will open 1,000 bookstores a year for the next five years and shut down internet operations after the Christmas holidays.

Bodhi Yoho, a tattooed semi-professional gamer who devours comic books, rarely goes outside, and hasn’t read a novel since failing to finish Hunger Games back in 2009, nonetheless works at the new bookstore. He told Bud Fox News that he’s excited to be part of the “new” Amazon: Continue reading →

These days, political correctness seems to dominate academia and university life to such a laughable extent that comedian Chris Rock won’t even perform on college campuses. As an aside (and then on to Yahoo), here’s a very recent example of PC run amok, although we at Bud Fox News desperately hope it’s a tall tale: At Pamona College in Claremont, CA, the student government association (“ASPC”) voted against funding Pamona’s participation in a party called “Mudd Goes Madd” that was being planned for all five schools in the Claremont consortium (Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, and Pitzer College) because the party’s name is offensive. According to the Claremont Independent, one of the student hosts for the event released a statement that she received from the ASPC; it included the following passage:

We are disappointed at your choice of the name for the event, as well as your rationale for allowing the name ‘Mudd Goes Madd.’ Your disregard of the concerns of the mental health community and their allies trivializes the issues that we deem extremely important to our community. Further, the exclusion of the mental health community in the discussion of allowing the event name is inappropriate.

Chris Rock won’t be playing Pamona any time soon.

If NYU is anywhere near as sensitive as Pamona, then on September 9, NYU Marketing Professor Scott Galloway, looking and sounding a bit like Bruce Willis, put a bull’s eye on his back (and guaranteed himself a first ballot entry into the Bud Fox News’ Plain Talkers Hall of Fame) when he said the following about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer:

I think Marissa Mayer is the most overpaid CEO in history right now…A CEO who has made some of the worst acquisitions in the history of tech…If she hadn’t announced she was pregnant with twins, she’d be out of a job within six months…She got a reprieve from death row because she’s pregnant with twins. I realize how awful that sounds, but she’s going to go down as the most overpaid CEO in history,..We should put a bullet in the head of the story called Yahoo. It’s time to euthanize this thing.

Over a long and storied career, Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Jo White developed a reputation for being a tough prosecutor and litigator, belying her diminutive stature. But she’s not so tough anymore.

As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, when she wasn’t facing down mobsters like John Gotti, she was putting terrorists like Ramzi Yousef (the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind) under the hot lamps. After her time as a prosecutor, she spent 10 years as chair of the litigation department at Devevoise & Plimpton, a white shoe New York City law firm.

As an unfortunate byproduct of this otherwise fruitful juridical pilgrimage, Ms. White came to know many characters on Wall Street, big business bosses, regulators, law makers, and prosecutors. When one runs in these rarefied circles long enough, you eventually become friendly with many of your “adversaries” and a system of favors and quid-pro-quo’s develops which helps maintain a stasis between the various powers of big business, government, and regulatory institutions.

A fine example of this is found in the story of Gary Aguirre, as well detailed in this Rolling Stone piece.

Aguirre joined the SEC in September 2004. Two days into his career as a financial investigator, he was asked to look into an insider-trading complaint against a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial. “It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,” Aguirre recalls. “And he wasn’t just buying shares — there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.” A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric — and Samberg pocketed $18 million.

After some digging, Aguirre found himself focusing on one suspect as the likely source who had tipped Samberg off: John Mack, a close friend of Samberg’s who had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley. At the time, Mack had been on Samberg’s case to cut him into a deal involving a spinoff of the tech company Lucent — an investment that stood to make Mack a lot of money. “Mack is busting my chops” to give him a piece of the action, Samberg told an employee in an e-mail.

A week later, Mack flew to Switzerland to interview for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston. Among the investment bank’s clients, as it happened, was a firm called Heller Financial. We don’t know for sure what Mack learned on his Swiss trip; years later, Mack would claim that he had thrown away his notes about the meetings. But we do know that as soon as Mack returned from the trip, on a Friday, he called up his buddy Samberg. The very next morning, Mack was cut into the Lucent deal — a favor that netted him more than $10 million. And as soon as the market reopened after the weekend, Samberg started buying every Heller share in sight, right before it was snapped up by GE — a suspiciously timed move that earned him the equivalent of Derek Jeter’s annual salary for just a few minutes of work.

The case seemed open and shut, but as Aguirre would soon find out, it was mostly shut. In the summer of 2005 when Aguirre told his boss he planned to interview Mack, things “started to get weird”. Aguirre was “contacted” (read hounded) by folks from Morgan Stanley, then an aide to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, then the SEC got a call from one of the firm’s top dog lawyers: none other than, you guessed it, Mary Jo White, herself the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York- the top cop on Wall Street. Continue reading →

Charles M. Elson, professor of finance and director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, had this to say about the current Volkswagen scandal in which the company rigged automotive software in at least half a million of its diesel-powered cars to cheat on U.S. pollution tests (and there’s a chance the same ruse was used in Europe where as many as 10 million cars might have the shady software):

It takes a real intellectual to point out the obvious, to wit: VW’s “supervisory board,” dominated by Ferdinand Piëch from 2002 until his ouster this past April, was such a joke that shareholders elected Piëch’s fourth wife, a former kindergarten teacher and his former governess, to the board in 2012. Well, even an educator of five-year-olds should know that after getting caught misbehaving as deplorably as VW has, it’s probably best to keep a low profile. So what did the company, founded by the German Nazi government in 1937, do for an encore?

Like a mid-binge drunk figuring that there’s no point in wasting a bottle that’s half-finished, it threw itself a big party, with Lenny Kravitz providing the musical entertainment. As reported by the New York Post: Continue reading →

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"I wouldn't buy a used car from a university president. They'll say, 'We're making moves to cut costs,' and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired." -Richard Vedder, economist

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